glTail.rb – Visualize Traffic In Real Time On Your Web Server

This is probably the most visual way I have ever used to analyze web traffic. Quoted from the authors website:

“glTail.rb allows you to view real-time traffic, data, and statistics from any log file on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way using Ruby, net-ssh, and OpenGL.”

The latest version adds several new features and fixes several bugs which annoyed me.

Release Notes:
13 Oct 2007 – v0.06 – Handle referrals including your site as params
- Handle disabling a block without disabling the source
- Rework coordinate systems, and swap to glOrtho instead of glFrustum
- PureFTPD parser
- MySQL activity log parser
- Background reverse IP lookup
- Use yaml for config file (Ian Ownbey <[email protected]>)
- Highlight rate/total/avg column
- Split source into several files (Ben Bleything <[email protected]>)
- qmail/vmpop3d parser (James Grant <[email protected]>)
- Postfix fixes (Andre Luiz dos Santos <[email protected]>)
- TShark parser (Landy Bible <[email protected]>)
- Updated Squid parser (Isuraeru Ochoa <[email protected]>)

Here is a video in case you would like to see it in action.

Ahhh – I love it.